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Hip Hop from Italy and the Diaspora: a Report from the 41St Parallel

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Hip Hop from Italy and the Diaspora: a Report from the 41St Parallel 24 gennaio-giugno 2002 Hip Hop from Italy and the Diaspora: A Report from the 41st Parallel Joseph Sciorra John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY, United States This is a story written at the confluence of Italy and its Diaspora. It is a tale that emerged from the dialogue between residents of Italy and members of the diasporic community using hip hop, a constellation of Afro-centric cultural forms developed in the United States, as the medium for communication. It recounts the production of a three-day event in Tuscany that brought together Italian hip hop artists and rappers of Italian descent from Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States for a symposium and a series of performances and demonstrations. In October of 1999, the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute hired me to develop and lead a new division entitled Academic and Cultural Programs. The twenty-two-year-old Calandra Institute is a research institute dedicated to the study and promotion of Italian American history and culture, and that conducts original research, offers courses, maintains a research library and an archive of historical artifacts, runs student and faculty exchange programs with Italian universities, provides career counseling on CUNY campuses, produces a cable television program and video documentaries, and publishes a social science journal entitled The Italian American Review. One of my responsibilities is to conceptualize and implement an annual program of symposiums, conferences, and public events that bring scholarly research on Italian Americans to both academics and the general audiences. A few weeks before joining the Calandra Institute I had met Italian composer and musician Lorenzo Brusci who was the sound technician on a video documentary my siblings and I are producing on our paternal grandmother’s one-hundredth birthday celebration in Abruzzo. In addition to leading the electronic experimental band Timet, Lorenzo organizes the annual Rassegna di Arti Contemporanee «Cicli» music festival in Montevarchi and Terranuova Bracciolini, in Tuscany’s Arezzo province. Through the course of several conversations and follow-up emails, Lorenzo and I developed the concept of bringing together Italian hip hop artists and rappers of Italian descendant for a event in June 2000 that we dubbed «Hip Hop from the Italian Diaspora». The basis of this idea grew directly out of my personal Web site – www.italianrap.com – where I document the history of rap in Italy, discuss the various aesthetic and social aspects of the culture, and provide Web-related resources like an artist directory, a message board, and links to other sites. Launched in December 1998, the site attracts artists and aficionados of rap Italiano from Italy, the United States, and around the globe, with over five thousand visitors each month. I first heard Italian rap in 1990 when an Italian friend visited New York City and brought me Jovanotti’s (Lorenzo Cherubini) 1990 CD «Giovani Jovanotti». While Jovanotti’s pop tunes were catchy, his raps in English were atrocious. Jovanotti’s horrid aping of African American music epitomized the worst in European pop culture that watered down vibrant © Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli 24 gennaio-giugno 2002 black musical styles into aural schlock. Geared toward Italian teeny boppers, the recording was representative of Jovanotti’s early work in the days before he transformed himself into a socially conscious recording artist and developed what music critic Felice Liperi termed «rap canzonettistico» (Liperi, 1993, p. 171). It was four years later when I first heard the music that was changing the Italian music scene and cultural world after my friend’s brother sent me a series of cassette tapes featuring Italian hip hop and reggae at the time – Frankie Hi-Nrg MC, Il Generale and Ludus Pinsky, Sud Sound System, and the Neapolitan bands 99 Posse, Almamegretta, and Bisca, as well as others. This music was radically different from Jovanotti’s initial and embarrassing forays into hip hop. The localizing of a global black popular culture in Italy was achieved through a series of interlocking elements. First, artists were rapping not in a phonetic English but in Italian and in various Italian dialects. Secondly, a number of them were creating musical hybrids that combined the global pop styles of rap and reggae with Italian vernacular musical traditions. And lastly, artists were addressing social justice and political issues, rapping about topics from the historic economic exploitation of the Mezzogiorno to the devastating impact of the mafia1. These were sounds I could only imagine in my wildest dreams. Born and raised in Brooklyn as a child of southern Italian immigrants, rap Italiano from the first half of the 1990s resonated strongly with me2. Early rap Italiano demonstrated that one could cultivate a sense of italianità by being grounded in local reality while still being connected to the larger cosmopolitan world, and do so with style. In the United States, in particular in the northeast, I had painfully observed that Italian Americans had developed personal and collective identities that were based on ethnic chauvinism, racism, sexism, and/or homophobia (Capone, Leto, and Mecca, 1999; Orsi, 1999; Rieder, 1985; Sciorra, in press). I had sought to create an alternative italianità for myself that was politically progressive and culturally popular, and that ultimately aimed to build «forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities» (Hall, 1988, p. 28). This self-awareness was not achieved without struggle and remains a continuous and dynamic process (Hall, 1990, p. 235). My ventures in rediscovery, reinterpretation, and reinvention (Fisher, 1986, p. 195) sought to understand the transnational process of the Italian Diaspora through its political, economic, and cultural manifestations, on both sides of the Atlantic (Gabaccia, 2000). To this end, I acknowledged the historic exchanges between Italy and the Diaspora and situated my place within an Italian history of economic depravation, vernacular cultural production, and labor migration that was undervalued or made invisible in the rhetoric of official Italian nationalism (Verdicchio, 1997) and American history books and the mass media. That was one reason why a song like Almamegretta’s 1993 «Figli di Annibale» (Hannibal’s Children) was such a breath of fresh air for me living in the United States. This musical exegesis unmasked the hidden negritude of the Mezzogirono by celebrating southern Italians’ historically ambiguous racial identity and the historic and emerging affinities between Italian working people and recent immigrants and people of color. To a reggae organ’s pulsating accompaniment, rapper Raiss’s raspy voice recounts in encapsulated form the African general’s march over the Alps and down the peninsula’s spine to trace why so many Italians are dark skinned. In the chorus, he proclaims in a haunting whisper, «Se conosci la tua storia, sai da dove viene. Figli di Annibale, sangue d’africa» (If you know your history, you know © Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli 24 gennaio-giugno 2002 where you come from. Hannibal’s children, blood of Africa.). My scholarly interests as a folklorist in la cultura negata of southern Italian immigrants and their descendants in New York City – the yard shrines housing concrete statues of the Madonna and various Roman Catholic saints, the religious processions and vibrant street feste, and Sicilian vernacular poetry, to name just three – sensitized me to the popular music emerging in Italy during the 1990s. Instead of publishing my research on rap Italiano in an obscure academic journal, I decided to use the Internet to disseminate my personal and professional interests to a significantly larger audience. Something fascinating happened soon after launching my Web site. I began to receive emails from Italian immigrants and descendants of immigrants who were «hip hop heads» living in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Some were ecstatic to discover that Italians rapped, while others, especially those in Europe, were familiar with the Italian hip hop scene and provided me with a growing list of hip hop artists from the Italian Diaspora3. This blurring of national boundaries under the flag of the planet-wide «Hip Hop Nation» by youth who rapped in different languages but shared a common musical and cultural vocabulary, provided new opportunities (with the help of the Internet) to connect members of the Italian Diaspora. This very idea was echoed in the longitude coordinate that names the Neapolitan group La Famiglia’s 1998 debut CD, «Quarantunesimoparallelo», astutely establishing the historic connections between the cities of Naples and New York, a key link for the Italian Diaspora, and amplifying the possibilities for collaboration that hip hop offered Italy and the Diaspora. On the track «Pe’cumpari» (For my pals), Mauro Di Camillo of La Famiglia’s KTM (Ki.Ta.Mourt’) crew sums up in English the expansive vision for a Diaspora-wide connection vis-à-vis hip hop: This album is for all the heads that for one reason or another had to go and handle their BI [business] and parted their motherland for different motives of survival. After years of melting in the pots of all the major cities of this planet, the remembrance of where their past generations came from will never be forgotten. It’s kept in a special place in their hearts and will remain there forever. The culture of hip hop is a way of life and La Famiglia lives this life on a day to day basis. So sit back and fasten your seat belt and enjoy the voyage. A course has been set and the correct coordinates are in check. Final destination: the 41st parallel project. It was in keeping with this spirit that I created a separate page on my Web site dedicated to these hip hop artists from the Diaspora.
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